08-effective-communication

Professor Shannon Ellis

2/7/23

Effective Communication

Course Announcements

  • Lecture Participation survey “due” after class
  • Midterm due Monday (2/13; 11:59 PM):
    • released Friday after lab
    • completed individually
  • Practice Midterm Posted (Answer key posted Wed/tomorrow)
  • Lab03 & Lab04 Scores & Feedback Posted
  • Lab04 Notes:
    • Model Interpretations
    • Text, code, & viz all matter
  • Link for Later

Agenda

  • Communicating for your audience
  • Oral Communication
  • Written Communication
  • Visual Communication

Consider your audience

What does this mean?

❓ What does it mean to “consider your audience?”

Simply: You do the work so they don’t have to.

…also the aesthetic-usability effect exists.

What’s the right level?

General Audience
✔ background
🚫 limit technical details
🎉 emphasize take-home

Technical Audience
⬇ limit background
💻 all-the-details
🎉 emphasize take-home

Considerations

  • Platform: written? oral?
  • Setting: informal? formal?
  • Timing: never go over your time limit!

Storytelling

  • Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
  • Stories do not need every detail of what you’ve tried
  • Reports and presentations should tell a story
  • Planning out your report/presentation can help
  • Hold the audience’s attention with what needs to be said; do so effectively
  • Tell your audience why they should care; why it matters
  • You should explain your choices and the “why”

Choose informative titles

On presentations: Balance b/w short and informative (goal: concise)

Avoid: “Analyzing NHANES”

Better: “Data from the NHANES study shows that diet is related to overall health”

On visualizations: emphasize the take-home! (what’s learned or what action to take)

Avoid: “Boxplot of gender”

Better: “Twice as many females as males included for analysis”

Avoid: “Tickets vs. Time”

Better: “Staff unable to respond to incoming tickets; need to hire 2 FTEs”

Effective Oral Communication

Brainstorm: Advice You’ve Been Given?

Student responses

Advice you've received
Speak loudly and clearly enough for everyone to hear (project your voice!); be engaging so that people are inclined to pay attention
Make eye contact with your audience as you speak
Don't just read off slides, and (most of the time) don't read from a script
loud and clear voice
Posture, eye contact, and mannerisms can all influence oral presentation performance. While presenting don't stand in one spot, get up, move around and engage with the audience.
try harder to better word choice
Look at the audience when I am talking to them. Speak loud and clear.
Eye contact!!!
eye contact, try not to use filler words, talk slower than you would normally, don't just read off of the slides
dont overcomplicate the wording, what might make sense to you might be revolutionary to someone else. Using simple words for simple explainations for begginer simple thought processes
drink water constantly
making enough eye contact

Presentations are for listening

  • Advantage: words to explain out loud what you’re showing
  • You are presenting for the person in the back of the room.

To accomplish:

  • don’t read directly off slides

  • repetition is ok: tell what you’re going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them

  • use animation to build your story (not to distract)

  • introduce your axes

  • text/labels larger

  • watch your speech speed

  • practice!

For Example: A Happy Ending for (almost) everyone in Little Red Riding Hood

  • Red Riding Hood (RRH) has to walk 0.54 mi from Point A (home) to Point B (Grandma’s)
  • RRH meets Wolf who (1) runs ahead to Grandma’s, (2) eats her, and (3) dresses in her clothes
  • RRH arrives at Grandmas at 2PM, asks her three questions
  • Identified problem: after third question, Wolf eats RRH
  • Solution: vendor (Woodsman) employs tool (ax)
  • Expected outcome: Grandma and RRH alive, wolf is not

Little Red Riding Hood

Effective Written Communication

Brainstorm: Advice You’ve Been Given?

Benefits of written communciation

Your audience has time to process…but the explanation has to be there!

Visually: more on a single visualization

Yes, often there are different visualizations for reports/papers than for presentations/lectures.

When you have time to digest (read)

❓ What makes this an effective visualization for a written communication?”

Source: Storytelling wtih data by cole nussbaumer knaflic

Data Science Reports in .Rmd

  • As concise as possible
  • Necessary details (for your audience); nothing more
  • Typical Sections: Introduction/Background, Setup, Data, Analysis, Conclusion, References

Controlling HTML document settings

  • Table of Contents
---
title: "Document Title"
output:
  html_document:
    toc: true
    toc_float: true
---
  • Theme
---
title: "Document Title"
output:
  html_document:
    theme: united
    highlight: tango
---
  • Figure Options
---
title: "Document Title"
output:
  html_document:
    fig_width: 7
    fig_height: 6
    fig_caption: true
---
  • Code Folding
---
title: "Document Title"
output:
  html_document:
    code_folding: hide
---

Controlling code chunk output

  • Specified in the curly braces, separated by commas

{r, chunk-label, results='hide', fig.height=4}
  • eval: whether to execute the code chunk
  • echo: whether to include the code in the output
  • warning, message, and error: whether to show warnings, messages, or errors in the knit document
  • fig.width and fig.height: control the width/height of plots
  • Controlling for the whole document:
knitr::opts_chunk$set(fig.width = 8, collapse = TRUE)

Editing & Proofreading

  • Did you end up telling a story?
    • Things missing?
    • Things to delete?
  • Do not fall in love with your words/code/plots
  • Do spell check
  • Do read it over before sending/presenting/submitting

Aside: Citing Sources

When are citations needed?

“We will be doing our analysis using two different data sets created by two different groups: Donohue and Mustard + Lott, or simply Lott”

“What turned from the idea of carrying firearms to protect oneself from enemies such as the British monarchy and the unknown frontier of North America has now become a nationwide issue.”

“Right to Carry Laws refer to laws that specify how citizens are allowed to carry concealed handguns when they’re away from home without a permit”

“In this case study, we are examining the relationship between unemployment rate, poverty rate, police staffing, and violent crime rate.”

“In the United States, the second amendment permits the right to bear arms, and this law has not been changed since its creation in 1791.”

“The Right to Carry Laws (RTC) is defined as “a law that specifies if and how citizens are allowed to have a firearm on their person or nearby in public.””

Reminder: You do NOT get docked points for citing others’ work. You can be at risk of AI Violation if you don’t. When in doubt, give credit.

Footnotes in .Rmd

How to specify a footnote in text:

Here is some body text.[^1]

How to include the footnote’s reference:

[^1]: This footnote will appear at the bottom of the page.

Effective Visual Communication

Brainstorm: Advice You’ve Been Given?

The Glamour of Graphics

  • builds on top of the grammar (components) of a graphic
  • considerations for the design of a graphic
  • color, typography, layout
  • going from accurate to 😍effective

Left-align titles at top-left

😬 Accurate

ggplot(penguins, aes(x = species, fill = species)) +
  geom_bar() +
  labs(title = "Adelie Penguins are the most common in Antarctica", 
       subtitle = "Frequency of each penguin species studied near Palmer Station, Antarctica") +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, vjust = 0.5, hjust = 1))

😍 Effective

ggplot(penguins, aes(x = species, fill = species)) +
  geom_bar() +
  labs(title = "Adelie Penguins are the most common in Antarctica", 
       subtitle = "Frequency of each penguin species studied near Palmer Station, Antarctica") +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, vjust = 0.5, hjust = 1),
        plot.title.position = "plot")

Avoid head-tilting

😬 Accurate

ggplot(penguins, aes(x = species, fill = species)) +
  geom_bar() +
  labs(title = "Adelie Penguins are the most common in Antarctica", 
       subtitle = "Frequency of each penguin species studied near Palmer Station, Antarctica") +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, vjust = 0.5, hjust = 1),
        plot.title.position = "plot")

😍 Effective

ggplot(penguins, aes(y = species, fill = species)) +
  geom_bar() +
  labs(title = "Adelie Penguins are the most common in Antarctica", 
       subtitle = "Frequency of each penguin species studied near Palmer Station, Antarctica") +
  theme(plot.title.position = "plot")

Borders & Backgrounds: 👎

😬 Accurate

ggplot(penguins, aes(y = species, fill = species)) +
  geom_bar() +
  labs(title = "Adelie Penguins are the most common in Antarctica", 
       subtitle = "Frequency of each penguin species studied near Palmer Station, Antarctica") +
  theme_bw() +
  theme(plot.title.position = "plot")

😍 Effective

ggplot(penguins, aes(y = species, fill = species)) +
  geom_bar() +
  labs(title = "Adelie Penguins are the most common in Antarctica", 
       subtitle = "Frequency of each penguin species studied near Palmer Station, Antarctica") +
  theme_minimal() +
  theme(plot.title.position = "plot")

Organize & Remove/Lighten as much as possible

😬 Accurate

ggplot(penguins, aes(y = species, fill = species)) +
  geom_bar() +
  labs(title = "Adelie Penguins are the most common in Antarctica", 
       subtitle = "Frequency of each penguin species studied near Palmer Station, Antarctica") +
  theme_minimal() +
  theme(plot.title.position = "plot")

😍 Effective

ggplot(penguins, aes(y = fct_rev(fct_infreq(species)), fill = species)) +
  geom_bar() +
  geom_text(stat='count', aes(label=..count..), hjust = 1.5, color = "white", size = 6) +
  scale_x_continuous(expand = c(0, 0)) +
  scale_fill_manual(values = c("#454545", rep("#adadad", 2))) +
  labs(title = "Adelie Penguins are the most common in Antarctica", 
       subtitle = "Frequency of each penguin species studied near Palmer Station, Antarctica") +
  theme_minimal(base_size = 18) +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_blank(),
        plot.title.position = "plot", 
        panel.grid.major = element_blank(), panel.grid.minor = element_blank(),
        axis.title = element_blank())

Legends suck

😬 Accurate

ggplot(penguins, aes(y = fct_rev(fct_infreq(species)), fill = species)) +
  geom_bar() +
  geom_text(stat='count', aes(label=..count..), hjust = 1.5, color = "white", size = 6) +
  scale_x_continuous(expand = c(0, 0)) +
  scale_fill_manual(values = c("#454545", rep("#adadad", 2))) +
  labs(title = "Adelie Penguins are the most common in Antarctica", 
       subtitle = "Frequency of each penguin species studied near Palmer Station, Antarctica") +
  theme_minimal(base_size = 18) +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_blank(),
        plot.title.position = "plot", 
        panel.grid.major = element_blank(), panel.grid.minor = element_blank(),
        axis.title = element_blank())

😍 Effective

ggplot(penguins, aes(y = fct_rev(fct_infreq(species)), fill = species)) +
  geom_bar() +
  geom_text(stat='count', aes(label=..count..), hjust = 1.5, color = "white", size = 7) +
  scale_x_continuous(expand = c(0, 0)) +
  scale_fill_manual(values = c("#454545", rep("#adadad", 2))) +
  labs(title = "Adelie Penguins are the most common in Antarctica", 
       subtitle = "Frequency of each penguin species studied near Palmer Station, Antarctica") +
  theme_minimal(base_size = 20) +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_blank(),
        plot.title.position = "plot", 
        panel.grid.major = element_blank(), panel.grid.minor = element_blank(),
        axis.title = element_blank(),
        legend.position = "none")

Additional Guidance

  • White space is like garlic - take the amount you need and triple it
  • Fonts Matter
  • Use Color Effectively

Suggested Reading

https://cogs137.github.io/website/